


Neverland

by thevoiceoflightcity



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: Agender Character, Alternate Universe, Canon Nonbinary Character, Crossover, Doctor Who Series Five, Far Too Long, Gen, I mean, I'm Bad At Tagging, Nonbinary Character, Poetry, The Pandorica, Universe Merge, also titles, because the original was written before i knew the dr was enby, i am not alone, i spent forever editing this to ey/em, is a common enough sentiment to show up in suggestions, it really amuses me that 'i am bad at tagging', occasionally, or something what do you call those anyway, tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-23 20:07:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7478145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thevoiceoflightcity/pseuds/thevoiceoflightcity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neverland is dead, and the Doctor lives, and Amelia Pond isn’t ever going to grow up. But there are cracks in the walls of universe, and not even the Doctor can run forever. (Crossover/AU with Peter Pan. I don’t know either, it’s weird. No relation to the Big Finish Neverland audio.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Neverland

**Author's Note:**

> Here be heavy spoilers for Series 5, though not as much as you’d think. The Peter Pan I have used here is, by the way, not the Disney Pan or Once Upon A Time Pan; I haven’t seen either, so I was working from the original J.M. Barrie Peter and Wendy book. One passage in particular (I don’t know if you have ever seen a map of Time, etc) is only changed to fit Gallifrey, so all credit to J.M. Barrie for that one. As usual, English is not my first language, so please tell me if I’ve made any stupid mistakes.
> 
> (Thanks to Thanatosx49 & seadragon on Teaspoon for feedback.)
> 
> EDIT: Pronouns now fixed. Ey/em for the Doctor (they're canonically nonbinary etc. etc. see my profile if you're confused) love from the voice of light city

“Dear Santa.”

“Thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you, but honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know it's not, because at night there's voices, so please, please, could you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman. Or a -“

That’s as far as she gets. The next bit is rather hard to explain.

There’s a shattering scream like storm-winds, and there’s the crash of breaking glass, and there’s a noise that doesn’t quite belong to this universe, a pulsing mechanical screech. None of the noises seem quite connected, reaching her independently of each other, twisting through directions she has no names for, and all ear-shatteringly loud. There is light, which is bright and tinged with fiery gold and darkish red. There is a shape in the room, crackling into existence with a smell like lightning. There is dark.

Amelia is thrown backwards, away from the bed, sprawling across the familiar floor. She scrabbles back to the bed, makes it halfway underneath, trying to see through the spots in her eyes. The noise fades away slowly, the fabric of the universe rippling back into normality, and Amelia lies flat with her eyes shut tight. Waiting. Listening.

Somewhere in the middle of the room, there’s a groan. It sounds human, to her surprise - and just about her size, too. Then there’s a slightly sickening crack, and a quiet yelp, and the creak of floorboards as somebody stands up.

Amelia opens her eyes just a crack, stares at the somebody from under the bed. All she can see is a slightly scorched, rather dirty pair of sneakers standing in the middle of a neat round hole burnt through her bedroom carpet. The hardwood underneath is scorched completely black.

The sneakers pad across the floor slowly, towards the window. It’s only when the figure steps into the patch of moonlight hanging in the air that she realizes, with a shock like glass, that it isn’t casting a shadow. At all. The moonlight is passing through it like it’s nothing.

Amelia shivers.

The sneakers turn, suddenly, and for a terrified instant she thinks it saw her. Except, no, it keeps turning, back to the black circle in her carpet. It speaks its first word, then, but it’s a word she can’t understand, something liquid and sibilant like ancient bells chiming. It sounds shocked. A little scared. Almost desperate.

Then the figure kneels down, slender hands frantically skittering across the empty ground. Looking for something, she thinks – something it needs. Another shimmering word hums through the air, and then a broken sob, a cry for help. Well, then.

Amelia sits up.

“Boy,” she says resolutely – although she’s not entirely sure the ragged creature in front of her is a boy, and something tells her it’s not even human – “Why are you crying?”

It keeps staring at her, green-blue-dark eyes wide with shock, mouth open ever so slightly. She was right, too – it is about her age, wearing a light-blue shirt and a brownish tie that looks like somebody left it in the oven by accident.

Then ey closes eir mouth, and smiles a stupid grin of a smile at her. “Do you have an apple? I’d really like an apple. I love apples. Maybe I’m having a craving.” Ey considers. “That’s new. I’ve never had a craving before.”

“Are you okay?” she ventures.

“Just had a fall,” ey says cheerfully, gesturing vaguely at the broken window and the sky behind it. “What’s your name?”

“Amelia Jessica Pond,” she says. “What’s yours?”

“That’s a brilliant name,” ey announces. “Amelia Pond.” Ey makes it sound magical and alien and special. “Like a name in a fairy tale. I’m the Doctor.” That sounds about right, she decides, but it does seem a strange sort of name. It’s awfully short, for one.

“Is that all?”

Ey stares at her and wriggles a little bit. “Yes. Maybe.”

“I’m so sorry,” says Amelia Jessica Pond, sincerely.

“Well,” says the Doctor, “It’s really rather complicated.” And then ey yelps out an “ow,” and collapses on the floor with a flash of light and a crash.

Amelia darts over, eyes wide, but ey rolls away from her, eyes shut tight. “No. I’m, I’m. I’m fine. This is all perfectly normal.” Then ey gasps, eyes snapping open, and for a moment they shine gold-fire-brighter than the sun.

“No, you’re not,” says Amelia decisively, and takes eir hand. Surprisingly, ey lets her, and eir skin burns gold-hot against hers as she pulls em upright. “Where did you come from?”

“That way,” ey manages, and point at the sky. “Second to the right, and straight on till morning.”

Amelia stares at em skeptically. “Is that what they put on the letters?”

Eir face falls a little. “I don’t get any letters. Phone calls, sometimes, radio messages – once somebody signaled me down with semaphore flags –“

“But your mother gets letters?”

“Don’t have one,” ey says decisively. “Overrated things. I’ve got forty-four cousins though. I mean, had.”

“I haven’t got a mother either. Or a father. I’ve just got Aunt Sharon.” Amelia leans in close. “I think the crack ate them.”

“What crack?” asks the Doctor, and then ey doubles over again, snapping downwards, air sparking that same sharp-spun gold. Eir breath hitches with what must be pain, and then ey sighs, exhaling a cloud of dusty gold.

“Who are you?” she breathes, watching the gold dissipate.

“I don’t know yet,” ey whispers. “Still cooking. Does it scare you?”

She looks at eir deep-dust-dark eyes. “Why were you crying?”

“Oh.” Suddenly ey seems almost ashamed, a little sad, the joyfulness gone out of em for a moment. “It’s my tardis. I can’t hear her. She’s in the vortex, and she won’t come out.

“What’s a tardis?"

“She’s a bit of me. Except she can fly better, and she’s smaller than I am.” Ey holds eir hands maybe six inches apart. “She’s the only one of her there is. There used to be lots and lots of her, and lots of me, but not anymore.”

Amelia glances around the room. “And she’s lost?”

“Well, no, not really.” Ey bends downward, tracing around the scorched circle with a fingertip, distracted by eir own cleverness. “She’s right here, sort of, but she won’t talk to me.” Eir face twists. “She got hurt when I got hurt, and now she’s angry at me.”

“Why haven’t you got a shadow?”

“I said she was a bit of me. It’s her shadow, too, you know.”  Ey picks at the floor, peeling away something thin and dark and shaped rather like em. “See, it’s not talking to me either.”

Amelia decides to ignore the fact that ey is _holding a shadow_ and concentrate on the problem at hand.

“How’s she hurt, then?”

“I… fell apart a bit, and then I burnt her by accident. It’s complicated. And my shadow came off somewhere in there.”

“Well, maybe we should get your shadow back, then, and she’ll come back when she feels like it.”

Ey squints at her. “I’ve _got_ my shadow.”  Ey waves the thin filmy darkness around. “It just won’t _stick_.”

“We can _make_ it,” says Amelia Jessica Pond, and grins.

“How?”

[=\\\=]

Amelia threads another stitch through the Doctor’s sneakers, loops it around carefully, pulls it tight.

The shadow feels like expensive silk in her hands.

The Doctor watches her and licks the last of the custard out of the bowl. “Are you done?”

“Not yet,” she replies, a little bit annoyed.

“So where’s your aunt?”

“Out.”

Ey tilts eir head. “And she left you alone?”

“I’m not scared.:

“Of course you’re not. You’re not even scared of me.”

“Why would I be?”

“I crashed through your window, exploded a little bit, burnt your carpet, and now I’m eating fish custard,” says the child reasonably. “Are you _done_ yet?”

“Nearly,” she hisses, thread between her teeth. “There!” She looks at em expectantly. “Did it work?”

Ey jumps up, wiggles eir toes (ey does not appear to be wearing shoes), the shadow mirroring em. Then ey grins at her, that same stupid happy grin. “It _did!_ Oh, I’m clever, aren’t I very very clever, Amelia? Look at me!”

“Oh, and I did nothing?” says Amelia, a little stung.

“A little,” ey says graciously.

“Well then,” snaps Amelia, and marches to the stairs, rather insulted.

“No, Amelia!” ey calls after her. She ignores him, stomps up the stairs viciously. “Amelia, please, you’re very clever too, it’s not your fault you were born with a human brain.”

“Hmph.” She refuses to look at em.

“Amelia,” says the Doctor next to her. “Amelia, you’re worth a thousand of me.”

She peeks a little. “Really?” Ey's on the other side of the stair railing, leaning towards her with big sincere eyes. No. Wait, what?

“Really really.” ey announces, utterly sincere, and completely ignoring any and all laws of physics. _Ey isn’t standing on anything._

“You’re not standing on anything,” she points out, a bit shakily. Ey looks down at eir feet, which are currently hovering in the middle of the stairwell, ten feet above the ground.

“Oh. Right.”

“You’re _flying,”_ she repeats, feeling that ey's not acting shocked enough. “Actually flying.” 

Eir head snaps up, a manic grin on eir face. “I _am -_ which means she’s _back!"_

There’s a snap and a whoop and an echo of the wheezing noise that had accompanied eir crash, and ey shoots upwards, banging through her bedroom door with a crash. She stares after em for a moment, tries to figure out the flying thing, gives up, and follows em.

By the time she makes it through the door, ey's kneeling on the black circle, talking excitedly to a hovering light in that same ice-and-bells language. The light is rather hard to get a good look at, not only because she won’t stop moving, fast insectlike darts, but also because the air vibrates blue around her in a way it really shouldn’t. Despite the glow, however, it’s fairly obvious she’s cross with em.

The Doctor’s river of syllables stops long enough for the blue light - the tardis - to snap something back at em which Amelia is fairly certain means _you silly ass._ It really is a wonderful shade of blue, suggesting skies and oceans and all the places that never end and none of the places you’re running from. She’d expected something like the shadow, indistinct and boring, or maybe some piece of complicated machinery, but the tardis is alive and ridiculous and beautiful.

They both stop squabbling to stare at her incredulously, which probably means she said at least some of that aloud. The tardis even stops moving long enough for Amelia to catch a glimpse of her - a tiny figure like a lady dressed in stars and the rich forever-dark between them, with wings made of the same gold as the Doctor’s eyes.

Amy flushes red. “Well, she is. I wish I had a tardis.” The tardis herself chitters something and goes back to zooming around the room.

“What did she say?” she asks the Doctor, who to her surprise blushes slightly.

“Well, she’s being rude. She says that you’re very, um, stupid. Also she’s the only tardis anywhere and she’s mine already. I’m paraphrasing,” ey adds helpfully.

“Where did you _really_ come from?” she asks em again, eyes narrowed slightly.

Ey pauses. Considers. “Everywhere. And neverwhere.”

“What does that mean?”

“Every time and every place,” ey tells her, eyes dancing. “Every moment that didn’t happened. Do you know, _I_ never happened, in this worldline? I was never born because the planet I was supposed to be born on never existed but I’m here anyway.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m a lie and a legend. I live in all the places you see when you close your eyes. I’m the unknown variable, the unaccounted-for, the outside factor, I’m the one who never grows up and never dies. I’m the _Doctor.”_

And then ey smiles, an ancient, innocent smile. Ey's holding her hand again, pulling her to the window, the tardis fluttering around them. “Would you like to come with me?”

“Let go,” she manages. Swallows. “I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t fly.”

“The tardis can help you. I’ll show you, it’s easy when she’s not cross.” Eir eyes are bigger than should be possible, swallowing her up. “You could fly, Amelia.”

“Like you?”

“Like me. I’ll teach you how to dance through stars. All of time and space, right outside that window.”

“Aunt Sharon would miss me,” protests Amelia, even though she’s fairly sure it’s a lie.

“No, she wouldn’t, we can fly through time. You can come back right after you left. Or five minutes ago. Maybe you’re under the window right now, waiting for yourself to leave. Isn’t that fun?”

She tries to look away and finds she can’t manage it. Opens her mouth. Closes it.

“...Oh, all right.”

The Doctor exclaims joyfully in eir silver language and claps for the tardis. The blue fairy-thing obliges grudgingly, coming to a near-stop next to eir face.

“Amelia needs a key,” ey tells her elegantly. She stares at Amelia for a long moment, evaluating, and then nods decisively. Then she’s pulling a necklace off her tiny neck, but as soon as it’s off it looks much bigger, big enough to fit Amelia or the Doctor, with a gold key hanging from a thin silver chain. The Doctor takes it carefully and presents to Amelia, who puts it on gingerly, feeling a little silly. “Where’s your key?” she asks the boy.

“I don’t need one, she’s a part of me, remember?” The tardis chimes something which is almost certainly _more like you’re a part of me, you beautiful idiot._ “Come along, Pond.”

“How do I…?”

The Doctor is already floating just above the ground in anticipation. “Just aim for the stars and let go,” ey explains. “Remember, second to the right, don’t miss the turn-off. Ready?” Ey doesn’t wait for an answer, goes straight into counting. “Three. Two. One.”

Something occurs to Amelia. “Wait. What about the crack in my - “

“ _Geronimo!_ ” shouts the Doctor, and with a noise like static-electronic keys scraped on a bass piano string, the world turns utterly gold.

[=\\\=]

The Doctor, as it turns out, really doesn’t exist anywhere in particular. Eir life is the dream you never dreamed, and dreams are never the same twice, after all. As long as you’re dreaming it really doesn’t matter. Everything makes sense while you’re dreaming, everything is wonderful sharp-spark-joy, everything shivers down your spine till you can barely breathe with the sheer adventure of it.

It’s when you wake up that’s the problem. It’s when you grow up.

But Amelia doesn’t need to grow up. Not with the Doctor.

[=\\\=]

_“Welcome to voting cubicle three thirty C. Please leave this installation as you would wish to find it. The United Kingdom recognises the right to know of all its citizens. A presentation concerning the history of Starship UK will begin shortly. Your identity is being verified on our electoral roll. Name, Amelia Jessica Pond. Age, thirteen hundred and six.”_

Amelia giggles.

A serious-looking man appears on the screen, talking about protesting and forgetting, but she stops paying attention after a little while. It’s probably politics.  Aunt Sharon talks about politics sometimes, it’s supposed to be really boring.  Then the real presentation starts, and she -

\- blinks. Stops. What? Her hand is on the red button labeled _forget_ in big black letters, and the presentation - what was it about, anyway?

She can’t remember. She knows there was something, and it was important, and she needs to get out of here, now, but she cannot remember. There’s something familiar about the not-remembering already, almost recognition, and. And. There was something else, before this, something with a wall and a blue light and the sound of a ticking clock. There’s something else she’s forgotten.

Then the Doctor drops in, swooping through the door and coming to a hovering stop next to her, and whatever it is slips out of reach again. Mandy comes in behind him, a little slower. Amelia likes Mandy; she’s older than Amelia and the Doctor but she’s very clever and helps them anyway.

“What’s that?” the Doctor asks, leaning over her shoulder. The tardis sings out a few words next to em and ey frowns. “Why’d you wipe your memory?”

Amelia is about to protest, and then she realizes ey's right. She did, she must have. She’d ripped the presentation out of her head herself. Somehow.

“Because everyone does,” says Mandy, quietly. “Everyone chooses the forget button.”

The Doctor turns to look at her. “Did you?”

“I’m not old enough to vote yet, stupid,” she tells em. “You’ve got to be sixteen.”

“I can vote,” Amelia announces proudly. “It thinks I’m three - thirteen hundred and something years old.”

“ _Cool,”_ says the Doctor, with great enthusiasm.

“You could try,” says Amelia. “I bet you’re only twelve hundred years old. Or something.”

“No, it wouldn’t play the video for me anyway.”

“Why not,” asks Mandy, “Are you Scottish too?”

“Worse,” ey announces with pride. “I’m not even human.”

“Ey's from Neverland,” Amelia whispers to Mandy. “Ey's the only one of em there is. There aren’t any others in the whole universe.”

The Doctor blinks at the screen, pretending not to have heard it, but for a single split instant the tardis’s light falters. “Not anymore,” ey amends quietly.

Mandy studies em. “What happened?”

“Long story.” Ey pauses, pushes a couple buttons. “There was a bad day. Bad things happened.” Eir voice wavers. “People stopped believing. I stopped believing.” And then ey snaps out of it, turns around, gives Amy the stupid grin. “Hold tight!”

And then ey hits the _PROTEST_ button and the floor opens up underneath them.

For half a second, Mandy is left staring at a blue floating light and a hole in the floor where two kids disappeared, and then the blue light darts after them with something like an exasperated sigh.

Mandy blinks. “Okay?"

[=\\\=]

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of time. Scientists sometimes draw maps of space, which can be intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of time, which is not only confused but keeps going round and under in the strangest ways. Space is easy, it’s a grown-up’s mind, straight and straightforward, but Time is like a child, all joy and words and infinite wonder - and Her map is very hard to draw.

There are zigzag lines on it, like your heartbeat on a card (except doubled,) and these are probably roads on the island; because Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of color here and there, and coral reefs in the deep-space coasts and rakish-looking crafts orbiting, and crystal spires and lonely caves and pompous ruler-magicians and glass cages in which black holes are trapped, and six founders plus one extra, most of which are dead, and red skies. It would be a very easy map if that were all, but there is also paradox-machines and a million billion planets and all the small probability games played by the people who live there and say seven minutes and lost spaceships and ticking clocks and irregular verbs with two hundred tenses and the song the stars sing and the tardis-nurseries in a quiet corner of 2310 and your thirty-second birthday and Pythia prophet-queen and sometimes the Nightmare Child and snakes with yellow eyes and so on; and either these are part of the Island or another map showing through and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.

Then there is the Enemy, pirates from past the shores and reefs of Time, and they are always at war with Neverland, but that is all right because the Doctor and eir kind are very clever and so they dance round and round Time, and that is the Game. Then there is the d-mat and the deathloops and the Skaro Degradations and the neverweres and other, nameless things - and then the Game stops being great fun and starts tearing the island apart. The cannons knock down the trees and the poison has killed the grass and the pirate-ships have torn the reefs and lagoons apart, until Neverland has lost its magic, is just a bare rock scorched by awful glowering fires. Until nobody could remember what it had been like, until nobody really believed in the wonder of the universe anymore - except, perhaps, for the Doctor.

Time is a child, we’ve said, with a child’s rambling curious mind. But what happens when that last point of light against the dark stops believing? What happens when the Moment breaks?

What happens when Time grows up?

[=|=]/p>

The first time Amelia is scared is the day they meet the Daleks.

“The Daleks?” she’d asked, but that was before, that was in Churchill’s office. Ey'd explained them to her, once ey stopped being cross because she didn’t know about them. Didn’t believe in them. That’s what ey'd said, even though she tried to tell em she would probably believe in them if she had any idea what a Dalek is and that ey should stop being a silly ass. (She’d taken up the responsibility of calling em an ass from the tardis, which the tardis found rather a relief, as it was a lot of work for such a small person.)

Eventually she’d worked out that the Daleks were rather like pirates in that they like to kill people and have plungers for hands, although the Doctor had looked at her funny when she made that comparison. They weren’t from Neverland, but they’d invaded it, which is why they’re supposed to know the Doctor, but they’re acting like they don’t. It’s all very queer. That isn’t why she’s scared, though. The reason she’s scared is the Doctor. The boy from everywhere.

It’s when the Dalek offers em tea in its cheap-radio-in-a-blender voice that it happens.

“ _STOP IT!” ey_ shrieks and knocks the tea off the tray with a vicious enraged kick and a great clang.

Everything in the room stops to look at him, Bracewell freezing midway through sipping eir tea. For a moment ey hangs there, half-desperate, floating about a foot off the ground, the tardis buzzing around em in circles - angry or scared, Amelia can’t tell. Ey swallows. “What do you want?”

The Dalek moves its blue eye downwards to look at em. _WE SEEK ONLY TO HELP YOU._

“To do what?”

_TO WIN THE WARRR._

“Which war?” Ey gestures wildly at Churchill - _Winston_ Churchill, and even if Amelia won’t admit it she’s a little impressed by that - and Bracewell.“Their war, or the War?”

 _I DO NOT UNDERSTAND,_ it grates, utterly emotionless. _I AM YOUR SOLDIER._

“Then _defend yourself!”_ the Doctor shouts, and then it happens very fast.

Ey's picking up the gigantic spanner lying on the desk before any of them can react. It’s huge, nearly as long as ey's tall, and should be far too heavy for em to lift, but ey doesn’t seem to care, anymore than ey cares about gravity. The tardis screeches something that could be a warning or an encouragement, and then ey hurls it over eir head, swinging it around in some complicated midair movement. It hits the Dalek with a clang that vibrates through the floor.

The Dalek barely reacts.

Then ey's hoisting the spanner up again, shouting furious incomprehensible words in eir silver language. Churchill manages a “What the devil, Doctor,” before the next clang, and then Bracewell is shouting too, something along the lines of _stop hitting my war machines._

The Doctor isn’t listening. And there’s something strange about him, then, in the tardis’s blue light - something inexplicably razors-edge _off._ Ey's supposed to be a child, and mostly ey acts like one too, even if ey is an ass sometimes. But this, now - it should look like a temper tantrum, childish frustration, but it doesn’t. Eir high screams don’t sound childlike anymore.

Amelia stands as frozen as everyone else. Watching. Waiting. Calculating. She’s properly scared of him, she realizes; she’s scared of the storm and fire behind eir eyes. And then ey slips back into English -

“Come on!” ey shrieks at the metal monolith. “Fight back! I know you, I know you want to, come on!” CLANG. “I _found_ you, I always find you, why won’t you - “ CLANG. “ What are you waiting for? You _hate_ me, you want to kill me! Well, go on! Kill me!” Ey roars it out, bringing the spanner down over and over again. “ _Kill me!”_

The Dalek moves.

Even the Doctor freezes then, waits as its eyestalk focuses on him, doesn’t even try to get out of the way.

_YOU… DO NOT REQUIRE TEAAA?_

The Doctor _snarls._

[=\\\=]

Amelia Pond meets Tiger Lily when she collides with the Doctor halfway through flying to the Byzantium.

The reason they were flying to the spaceship was a bit vague and had something to do with a funny-looking box that the Doctor claimed had coordinates in eir silver language on it. Very urgent. (She still doesn’t understand a word of it, doesn’t even know what it’s called; she’s named it the silver language in her head, for lack of a better term, and it’s starting to annoy her. She’d rather like to speak to the tardis directly. Having to ask the Doctor what she’s saying all the time makes it hard to have conversations about what an ass ey is. )

So they jump into the vortex - and Amelia doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to that, the breathless golden fire in her bones, the sensation of incredible speed as universes whip past her like smoke. You can’t really see anything, in the vortex - you just have to focus on the Doctor’s hand in yours and the blue light of the tardis ahead and enjoy the ride.

And then, with a screech and a flare of golden curls, the Tiger Lily flash-flickers into existence directly in front of them.

The Doctor’s eyes go comically huge, and then Tiger Lily crashes into em and ey's gone, torn into normal space by the impact. The tardis flickers, seems to grin, and goes after him, pulling Amelia after her with that familiar grinding noise.

They come out on a rocky, unhappy-looking planet, just across from the smoldering wreck of the Byzantium. The Doctor is pulling emself upright, staring at the golden-haired girl with something like horror. Tiger Lily is already standing, fiddling with something small and iPhone-ish, grinning at the Doctor. The tardis pops in next to Amelia, takes one look at the Doctor’s face, and starts laughing her bright tinkling laugh, nearly falling out of the air with mirth. Tiger Lily grins wider.

The Doctor blinks and hisses something that’s probably _shut up_ at the tardis. The tardis magnificently fails to listen to em. Tiger Lily’s eyes dance. Amelia feels like she should probably say something, but watching the Doctor squirm is an awful lot of fun.

“...River?” the Doctor says helplessly.

The other girl’s grin morphs into a something else, a quieter smile. “Hello, sweetie."

The Doctor glances at Amelia, eir eyes saying _help me,_ and she takes pity on him, turns to face the girl. “Why can you fly?”

The Lily smiles at Amelia instead. “I’ve got a key.”

Amelia frowns. “From the tardis?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you get it?”

She tilts her head at the Doctor. “Ey gave it to me.”

Amelia’s eyebrows go up. “Wait, when?”

Then the Doctor’s back, swooping up and landing between them, waving eir hands. “In my future, her past, it’s complicated and we shouldn’t talk about it.”

“Spoilers,” adds the girl with another strange smile.

The Doctor glares at her. “What do you want?”

“Ooh, rude. Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

“You probably should,” Amelia points out. “It’s only polite.”

The Doctor glares at her too, for good measure. “Tiger Lily, this is Amelia Jessica Pond. Amelia, this is Tiger Lily, warrior-queen of the time-forests. Also archaeologist, sometimes.”

“Oh, so I _do_ get to be queen! Excellent.”

While the Doctor fumes, Amelia takes the opportunity to get a good look at the weird girl. She seems like she’s only a few years older than the Doctor, maybe eleven, wearing a black dress that manages to look relatively practical and ridiculously pretty at the time. Her eyes are blue-gray-green with a hint of the Doctor’s gold behind them, her hair nearly the same bright yellow color - the color of the vortex, of Time - her skin a rich russet-bronze. She’s whispering to the tardis in the same language the Doctor uses, the tardis chiming back between leftover giggles. Tiger Lily, ey'd said - the name sounded exotic and faraway and adventure. Amelia decides, suddenly, that she likes the weird girl.

The Doctor kicks a rock.

[=\\\=]

“Why’d you call her River?”

“Hmph.”

“D’you know her?”

“Ugh _._ Well. Not yet.”

“Is she nice?”

“Who cares? I don’t!”

“D’you _like_ her?”

_“No.”_

[=\\\=]

Ey brings her back to her bedroom, after the angels. Through the still-broken window, back onto the black circle that’s somehow still smoking slightly a million years later. It doesn’t feel real, not really - she’s started to forget what it looked like, started to forget the color of the walls and how soft the blanket is and the way the trees whisper her to sleep outside. She’d slept in the vortex mostly - ey'd showed her how to lean back on a gust of timewind and let it carry you anywhere and everywhere through the night, and she’d fallen asleep with the tardis’s whisper-wheeze in her ears. It scares her, a little, to realize that she’d forgotten that she wanted to come back someday. And there was something else, too, something to do with her wall and the spider-thin line scrawled across it -

She blinks, forces herself to, trying to ignore the stab of terror that happens when she closes her eyes because for a moment in the dark she’s still in the endless spaceship forest, and the Doctor is too far away where it’s safe and the angels are around her, are inside her, and she can’t see and she can’t stop and she can’t open her eyes and she can’t fall and she’s dropped the communicator and the angel in her head roars its triumph, knowing she just has to forget about it for a single split instant, that she just has to turn away or open her eyes and it will have her and she is _scared -_

Amelia Jessica Pond shivers on the unfamiliar bed and sniffs and tries not to cry and fails.

The Doctor stands next to the bed awkwardly, eir eyes alien and too old for eir face, on the edge of grown-up. The tardis is alternating between investigating Amelia’s room and buzzing around the Doctor’s head, but she isn’t human either and she’s too much the Doctor to know what to do.

Eventually, after too long, ey sits down on the bed beside her, shuffling a little, and puts an arm around her shoulder. Amelia wonders, vaguely, if Tiger Lily - River? - would have known. She seemed - more human than em. More real. But there was gold in her eyes too.

It’s not like it matters. She disappeared into the clouds with the soldier, the priest, whatever his name was. She grinned her grin at the Doctor and told em - _when the pandorica runs down  -_ and left.

Amelia Jessica Pond pulls herself together.

“I don’t,” she manages. “I forgot what it was like. Here.”

Ey cocks eir head at her. It only makes em look more alien.

“My room. It’s - smaller. No, it’s the same, isn’t it? And otherwise I’d change it but I wasn’t here so it just stayed.”

“Yes,” ey says simply.

“I don’t - when we flew in, for a moment, I thought the window would be closed. That we couldn’t go back, ever again.”

Something flickers in eir eyes, deep down where the wild things grow. “It happens.”

“What?”

“One day,” ey says, staring through her, “one day you come back and the window’s barred shut and someone else is in your bed. That’s what happens. People forget you and they replace you and they leave you, over and over again.”

She stares at him, confused.

“Do you know, when grown-ups tell you everything’s going to be all right? Or when they say, ‘I’ll be right back?’”

“They don’t,” she whispers, and there is fear in her voice. “They don’t come back.”

Ey doesn’t answer her, turns away. She leans against em and stares at the ceiling, feeling em go rigid with shock and relax under her.

“But we’re not grown up. We don’t have to go. We don’t ever have to.”

Ey still doesn’t answer. She rolls over a little, trying to get a good look at em. “We can stay together.”

“We can stay together,” ey says, and the way ey says it makes it sound like a promise and an incantation, and suddenly the echoes of the angels in her head are gone.

She sits up properly, smiles at em. “You know, you could give me a kiss now.”

Ey turns back to her, and eir eyes are normal again, just the usual tinge of gold. “What?”

“You’re allowed,” she says carefully.

“Oh, alright,” ey says, and pauses, staring at her in confusion.

“You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” Ey stares at her expectantly. Blinks. She waits patiently. “....No.”

“You can give me a _kiss.”_

“Oh, right, of course.” Pause. Blink. “...No, still not getting it.”

“A _kiss,”_ she repeats, a little embarrassed.

“What’s a kiss?” ey asks matter-of-factly.

“Oh. Um.” She turns more than a little red. With the hand that’s behind her back, she gropes on the bed for something, anything. There! It’s small and round, that’s good enough. “This,” she volunteers, and hold whatever it is up.

It’s a thimble. “Oh,” says the Doctor. “You used that when you sewed the tardis back on, didn’t you?”

“Your shadow,” she corrects automatically.

“Well, same thing.” Ey face falls. “I don’t think I have one of those. I could ask the tardis, she’s got everything in her pockets.” The tardis pulls something tiny out and holds it up behind eir head, doing that trick where things are suddenly normal-sized once they’re out of her bag.

“No,” says Amelia, still blushing, “That’s alright. I can give you one instead.”

The Doctor takes the thimble and considers it carefully. “Thank you.” Behind him, the tardis shrugs and puts her thimble on her head instead, like some kind of silver flat-topped cap. Amelia tries not to giggle and fails, again.

The Doctor turns around and squeals something delighted in the silver language. “Oh, you’ve got a kiss too! Is that what you do with them?” ey asks Amelia.

“Um,” says Amelia, but ey's put it on eir head already.

“Kisses are _cool.”_

[=\\\=]

Amelia is not the first girl to travel with the Doctor.

She’s fairly sure of this, even setting aside Tiger Lily, because of things ey's said, because of stories ey tells her sometimes that seem like there’s a person missing.

She thinks ey might not know. Eir memory is surprisingly short, for someone so clever; ey lives in a series of disconnected instants, changing moods from moment to moment, quick and volatile and always laughing. She’ll tell em about something that happened yesterday, and ey'll frown at her, shrug. She’ll ask em what the color of the sky back on Earth was, and ey'll tell her it was orange with perfect certainty, while she’s nearly positive it was a sort of dark violet. Ey never knows where ey's going or where ey's been, and maybe that’s why ey's never grown up.

The Doctor is good at forgetting. Ey has to be. Ey's had lots of practice. But Amelia is learning, and one day when she wakes up, drifting in the vortex, she realizes she doesn’t know what her aunt’s name was and she doesn’t care.

Besides, Amelia’s had practice too. Didn’t she have a mum and dad, once?

[=\\\=]

She asks em about it, that night.

Well, night - it’s never dark in the vortex, but they’re tired so they’re calling it a day. They’ve slipped into a slow, warm current (or breeze - Amelia still hasn’t decided if it’s an ocean or a sky,) which means her thoughts are slow and warm too. In some of the faster driftlines, it’s nearly impossible to think, the world flashing through your head hot and fast and impossibly sharpspark gold, a barrage of seconds and then the universe hits you in a single gasping flare, and then you’re hovering on a new planet under new stars.

No, this is a lazy wind, and so they stretch back and hold hands and yawn, the tardis’s light a steady deep-blue veil between them and everything else.

“You never actually told me what happened to you,” she manages eventually, eyes slipping shut.

Ey's less tired than she is - well, ey's never _really_  tired, doesn’t seem to actually need sleep, but in these bits of the vortex it’s hard to stay awake regardless - but ey's still too drowsy to do eir usual mysterious enigmatic thing. “What?”

“When you crashed into my bedroom.”

“Oh, right.”

She turns her head to look at em. Ey's staring into space, watching the eddies and swirls of the vortex dance into the middle distance. Eir eyes are doing that trick she can’t get a hold of where they manage to be green-dark like forests and smooth shining mirrorgold at the same time.

She shakes her head and it’s gone; they’re just green again. “So what did happen?”

“Things,” ey slurs. “I got shot. No, that was a different one. It was all Kosch's fault, anyway.”

She squints. “You got _shot?”_

“No, I didn’t, that was ages ago, weren’t you listening? Radiation probably. I,” ey announces, “Don’t _like_ radiation. Tickles. Also kills you, eventually.”

“What?”

“No, that was it. I died. Nothing major, happens all the time. Not important.”

“S’not really.”

“Hmm?”

“S’not really nothing major, dying. You _die._ ”

“Not me. I can, it’ll happen eventually, but it’s harder. Not yet.”

Amelia tries to consider this idea and all its implications fully and can’t manage it. In her defense, she’s had a long day and there were lots of lizard people with guns in it. Also she nearly got dissected. “Thass weird,” she eventually decides.

The Doctor turns to look at her, and suddenly ey's more awake, more there. “Amelia,” ey says. “If I never grow up, whatever makes you think I would ever die?”

It’s only much, much later that she realizes what the sentence really means, and that the only people who never grow and never stop and never change and never remember are the dead.

[=\\\=]

one hundred songs

are in my mind

of old of new

of everywhere

that ever was.

one hundred dreams

i’ve lived alone

and roamed

the universe

one hundred voices

call to me

each night

but i refuse to listen.

[=\\\=]

“So who did you travel with??”

Confusion. “What?”

“Y’know. Before me.”

“Oh.”

“I thought you did. Something you said.”

“No, I did. I just - it’s hard to remember, sometimes.”

“What does that mean?’

“Do you want to know, Amelia Jessica Pond? Do you really?”

She considers. “Yes.”

Ey takes a breath, hesitates, and then it spills out - talking fast, as if wanting to get it over with, eyes shut tight. “I’m forgetting. I don’t know, and the not knowing _hurts._ I - I remember I was alone for a while. I remember. And I remember before the Game, when I’d just bring them to Neverland, when I didn’t need to see the universe.”

Soft. “Who?”

“I - there was a girl, and I loved her an awful lot, and she had short black hair and she was a little timid, but I didn’t care because she was so - so. Her name. It started with a S, I think. “

“Doctor, it’s okay,” she tries, but ey's lost in eir own head, face blank, eyes shut, thinking too hard.

“I don’t - she had two brothers, and they were John and Micheal, and we fought the pirates and she told the Lost Boys stories but I can’t _remember.”_

Ey turns to her, eir hands cooler than human in hers, eyes desperate. “What was her name? _Amelia, what was her name?”_

“I don’t know.”

“When I say it aloud it’s almost there,” ey rants, “It’s just on the edge - Sophie, no, it was Su- it was I had it it was - ”

Ey wails, heartbroken.

[=|=]

Amelia gets hurt sometimes. The Doctor gets hurt sometimes. It’s okay. They have each other, and the tardis keeps an endless supply of bandaids in her blue bag (marked _pull to open_ in black on white for some obscure reason.) The tardis never gets hurt; she’s fast and small and clever and not really solid in any meaningful way, not for people who aren’t the Doctor. Nobody even seems to see her. Sometimes she gets locked away, stuck in some drawer or behind a prison door by accident - she can’t fly into the vortex without the Doctor and the Doctor can’t fly into the vortex without her and Amelia can’t fly at all when the tardis isn’t around, so that leaves them stuck until they find each other again. Oh, and that’s always wonderful, the reunions - the tardis and her Doctor, jumping into each other, talking excitedly in their private bell-language. Not that they have too; the tardis understands every language in the universe, and the Doctor speaks all of them. They just like it that way. They’re a team. They’re never really apart, anyway - at least, the Doctor claims they’re connected inside their heads.

It’s all a bit confusing for Amelia, but she doesn’t mind. It’s not like she’s going to be jealous of a little blue light. She does prefer the Doctor though, if only because ey actually speaks English most of the time, whereas the tardis never talks to anybody but em. Even her screams sound like bells.

Amelia discovers that particular fact when they’re heading for the fifth moon of Cindie Colesta and hit - something - instead. Whatever the something is, it feels like a shock wave of something bigger, the vortex stretching unnaturally around them, the gold spinning into infrared and ultraviolet, the world abandoning any semblance of obeying the laws of physics, stretching her out into a thin shivering blank-white place with no walls and no stars and no sound and no thought, the tardis-light nearly drowned out by the pain and _wantneedhatewant_ encoded into the nonair. A place where the entire universe is made out of fissures and slow soft ticking.

It doesn’t actually hurt her, although she nearly throws up from the disorientation of it. But the Doctor’s face goes gray half a second before the shockwave hits, and it hits em much harder. Eir screams are high and fragile and go on far too long.

The tardis is worse. She starts with bells - not just her voice, real bells, long and deep and ancient, tolling into the forever with a taste like old stone. And then it deteriorates, stutters off into a wailing shriek that makes it very clear that she does not want to let go.

Then the shockwave rips the Doctor out of the vortex altogether and Amelia doesn’t think about anything at all for a while.

When she wakes up the tardis is curled up in her red hair - the first time Amelia’s ever seen her completely still - shivering slightly, eyes closed, silent. The Doctor is nowhere.

Amelia waits, and tries not to panic.

(Eventually the tardis does come awake long enough to give her a headset thing with the Doctor on the other end, and from then on things are easier. The Doctor is locked out of the vortex and the tardis is locked in, but it’s fixable. The shockwave turns out to be caused by something small and reddish, rather like the tardis herself, except that the red one was missing _his_ other half, his Doctor, and tried to steal the tardis’s instead. In the end the worst that comes of it is that the Doctor spends half a week sleeping over at a boy named Craig’s house in exchange for an endless supply of jelly babies, or something. It’s okay. It’s all okay.)

(It’s all okay.)

[=\\\=]

tick tock goes the clock

he fed it to the monster

tick tock goes the clock

all claws and teeth and lies

tick tock goes the clock

think about what you’ve forgot

tick tock goes the the clock

until the doctor dies.

[=\\\=]

“I liked Vincent.”

“Mmm,” says the Doctor.

She turns to em. They’re not in the vortex, this night - they’re halfway through overthrowing a government, so they’re sleeping in the rebel camp. The Doctor has an annoying habit of drifting upwards while ey's asleep and scaring the grown-ups. Ey's doing it now, staring at the stars, hanging two inches above the bed.

“Doctor,” she hisses.

Ey looks down at her, confused. She taps the straw mattress. “Oh. Sorry.”

They fit perfectly on a one-man bunk together; also, if needed, the trunk of a car or under a table or in medium-sized cabinets. It’s been convenient more than once. Amelia considers.

“You could give me a kiss, if you like.”

“Oh, do I have to give it back already?” the Doctor says, face falling. Ey hits the bed with a bump - it’s hard to float if you’re even a little bit sad.

She thinks fast. “I didn’t mean a kiss, I meant a thimble.”

“What’s that?”

“This,” she says, and kisses em on the cheek.

Ey doesn’t react until she lies back down, and then ey rubs eir cheek where her lips touched thoughtfully. “Okay.” Ey frowns. “Weird.”

“Says the one who has _two hearts._ ”

“You’re one to talk, you’ve got _l_ _ungs.”_

“Just because _you’ve_ got a respiratory whatsit and air sacs doesn’t mean lungs are weird.”

“They’re inefficient! Who designs a system like that?”

“You _explode_ when you die!” Amelia half-shouts, and dissolves into laughter.

“Shh, someone will hear,” the Doctor manages, but neither of them can quite stop giggling.

[=\\\=]

this is truth: at the eye of the storm, there is quiet. there is safety. time borrowed from the jaws of the crocodile.

this is truth: you can’t run forever.

[=\\\=]

“So what happens?”

“Us! The tardis knows every language. All we have to do is surface and have a look.”

Then there’s the familiar snap and a breath of warm air on her face. They’re in a place that looks vaguely prehistoric jungle-esque, the trees dropping out into great red rocks in front of them, and on the rock -

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh,” whispers the Doctor, still staring.

The writing on the rock, letters fifty feet high, is this:

HELLO SWEETIE - Πάν - ΦΓΥΔζ.

The Doctor grins.

[=\\\=]

“You graffitied the oldest cliff face in the universe.”

“You wouldn’t answer your phone.”

Tiger Lily is stretched out on the chair, in her element, smiling the enigmatic smile. The tardis immediately starts playing with her jewelry (solid gold, by the looks of it,) chirping quietly. The two Romans bow and back out carefully, Amelia staring after them. “Why are they doing that?”

The Doctor opens eir mouth but Tiger Lily overrides em.

“They think I’m a child goddess,” the Lily announces. “Also I’m very clever.”

“What did you do?” asks Amelia.

“Well, I can fly.”

The Doctor, currently two feet in the air emself, shakes eir head. “Why did you do it? What do you need?”

The Lily sits up, suddenly all business. Pulls a roll of paper out from behind the chair, offers it to em.

“What’s that?”

“A painting. Your friend Vincent. Ey saw things.”

The Doctor takes it, cautiously. “A painting?”

“I assume it’s some kind of warning.”

“Does it have a title?”

“The Pandorica Runs Down.”

“That’s a _fairytale._ ”

“And what are you, Doctor? Look at it. What are you waiting for?”

Ey throws her a glare, and unrolls it carefully, trying not to let the paint crack. Ey studies it meticulously, not looking away, nothing in eir eyes. The tardis circles eir head slowly, toying with eir hair almost apologetically. Amelia floats upwards, leaning over eir shoulder, scans the painting. It’s kind of abstract, and undeniably very, very old, but the picture is still clear - and it’s the tardis.

And she’s burning.

Amelia stares at the picture, trying to make sense of the swirls of color. Vincent could see the tardis, unlike any other adult they’ve met - he said she was beautiful, that he might paint her sometimes. He could even _fly,_ on his good days, with the tardis key. Even the Doctor was surprised by that. They took him to the Gallery through the vortex, so that explains why he knows what the gold-silver-white background looks like - but the tardis in the picture is. Is burning, and there is no explanation, just what must be space-time coordinates penciled into a corner.

“The Pandorica,” she asks, tentatively, and it’s Tiger Lily who answers her.

“A warning, a cage, a time bomb. Built to contain the most feared thing in the universe.”

“But it’s a _story._ It’s not real.”

Tiger Lily’s eyes burn. “If it is real, it's here and the clock is about to run out.”

Sudden and sharp, the Doctor looks up, smiles the scary smile. “Trouble is happening, out there.” The smile widens. “Let’s go poke it with a stick.”

A long horseback ride later, they’re in Stonehenge of all places. Amelia was there once with her aunt - whatever her name was - she thinks, but she remembers it as being much further away, and also behind an awful lot of fences. This is Stonehenge close up. And more than Stonehenge.

The tardis announces something loudly, floating in the middle of the circle. “It’s here,” the Lily translates, hand in Amy’s. “She says it’s under the stones.” The Doctor’s circling the whole structure from the air, calling out incomprehensible words down to them every once in a while - and then ey shrieks victory, dives downwards like a hawk.

It would have looked a lot more elegant if it hadn’t ended with a thump and a muffled “ow,” but it seems to have worked - one of the stones is sliding upwards, revealing an empty space, leading down. The Doctor’s head pokes over one of the rocks, grinning stupidly, hair all over eir face. “I’m very clever,” ey informs them.

“You don’t say,” notes Tiger Lily, and jumps down the hole.

The Doctor makes a face at Amelia that basically equates to _why isn’t she impressed with mee_ and tumbles after her with a whoop, the tardis spiraling down with em.

When Amelia lands - coming to a soft stop just above the ground, like the Doctor taught her - the Doctor has already grabbed an ancient-looking torch and lit it off the tardis’s blue-sparking flame, lighting the room a little bit. Ey hands it to Amelia and ventures forward, the tardis glowing as bright as she can manage. She drifts after him, a little bit creeped out but not willing to admit it.

The corridor is longer than seems possible and dark and full of cobwebs that stick in her face when she flies too high, so she stays low as she can manage. Tiger Lily and the Doctor walk together, neither of them saying anything. The Doctor stops grinning, gets whiter and whiter as they move down the corridor, breathing less and less in some bizarre Doctor version of hyperventilating. Amelia tries not to think too hard about what could possibly scare the Doctor

The corridor ends, eventually, in a great barred door that looks too heavy to ever move - but underneath the dust of centuries it’s silver, some gleaming anachronistic metal stronger than steel. The Doctor is, by this point, practically holding eir breath, and yet if Amelia didn’t know em she would think ey's utterly calm.

Ey reaches for the bar.

“ _Wait,_ ” says Tiger Lily suddenly, looking upwards, her eyes still rimmed in dark goddess kohl. “Listen.”

_tick-tock. tick-tock._

_tick-tock. tick-tock._

The walls are clicking, in double-heartbeat rhythm, like some great ancient clock.

“It’s close," says the Doctor, voice perfectly flat, and opens the door.

It’s big.

That’s the first impression Amelia gets off the box: that it’s _huge -_ twice her size, maybe, made out of the same strange metal as the doors but somehow completely free of any dust. The sides are engraved with massive clock faces, ticking off the millennia, it’s pedestal covered with more circular patterns that look vaguely like languages too old even for the tardis to decipher. There’s a low, unearthly hum hanging in the air around it, sliding off into all the nooks and crannies of the old-stone walls -

“There was a game,” says the Doctor, suddenly, quietly. “Or a trick. Or a war. And there were nameless, terrible things that fought there. There was no negotiating with them, no stopping them. Then the game ended, and that was worse, and then the game never was at all. We’d named our island after all the things that aren’t, and haven’t ever been, and we never knew how true that was.”

Ey pauses, runs eir hands down the clock-faces. Amelia could swear she sees the solid metal shiver. “There was a story, and that was Neverland; and there was a story told there, a legend within a legend, about a clock and a box with a monster in it and time running out.” Breath. “This is it.”

“...How did the monster end up in there?” Amelia asks eventually, her voice muffled by the thick ancient silence.

“You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricks it.”

“I hate good wizards in fairy tales, they always turn out to be em,” sighs Tiger Lily.

“Except,” ey breathes, “ I don’t think it has. Yet.”

“...What?”

“That ticking. That’s Time, or what’s left of it. That’s the corpse of Neverland, and Neverland was eaten long ago.”

Ey turns back to Amelia, swallows. The tardis flickers. “The Crocodile - I don’t think it’s in there. Not yet. There’s a signal coming from this room, to every time and place, pulling it in. This isn’t when the Pandorica opens. This is when it closes. This is when the monster gets locked up.”

“Which means -” whispers Tiger Lily.

“Which means it’s coming here. Right now.”

[=\\\=]

Tiger Lily is the first to speak, and her voice is surprisingly steady. “All right, then, let’s go.”

The Doctor squints at her. “What?”

“You. Are leaving. Right now.”

Ey blinks. “I am?”

“I don’t care about your legends or your bloody survivor’s guilt, Doctor, you’re not going to stay here until the monster shows up. I just scanned that box. It’s opening from the inside out. I don’t care if you’re right and it’s coming or if it’s in there - either way we’ve got three hours at the most until the clock runs down. You better not have any intention of waiting for it.”

Eir eyes flicker gold. “I can’t leave.”

“Yes you can, look, door, corridor, sky. Aim for the stars and out you go.” She grabs eir hand, drags em back. Ey lets her. “Come _on._ ”

“How did Vincent know?”

They both look at her. She stands up straighter. “How did ey know it was here?”

“Well, the signal, it’s everywhere, he’ll have picked up on it,” the Doctor tries. “He's a little bit psychic, that’s why he could see the Krafayis.”

“Everywhere?”

“Oh,” says Tiger Lily. “Oh. And everyone?”

“Must be. Why?”

“Vincent’s human,” the Lily explains, eyes calculating. “Slightly psychic or no. If he picked up on it, it must be incredibly strong. The question is - who else heard it?”

Tiger Lily and the Doctor look at each other for a moment, and then Tiger Lily pulls something technological-looking out of a pocket. “Doctor, reflect back the signal so I can pick up the feedback.”

“Doing,” ey says, and floats in the air doing absolutely nothing. The tardis whips into circles above them, doing something complicated with the air that Amelia can’t identify. “Are you getting anything?”

“Give me a moment.”

“Lily, who is out there?”

 _MAINTAINING ORBIT,_ grates the communicator suddenly. _SHIELDS DOWN ON ION SECTOR._

Amelia gasps. “Those are Daleks. I know them.”

“Daleks,” the Doctor manages. Curiously enough, ey seems less afraid than ey was walking up the corridor - Daleks are just Daleks in the end, and ey's beaten them a million times. Ey's even started breathing again. “Okay. Battle fleet, at least twelve thousand ships, I can manage that.

 ** _course corr-ec-tion pro-cee-ding,_** buzzes through the room, another entirely different voice.

“Cyberships. Well, we’ll turn them against each other, that should be easy enough - it’s _Daleks._ They’re so cross.”

“It’s not just Cyberships. Sontarans, four battlefleets.”

“Well, that’s all right, they’re nearly as cross.”

“Terileptil. Slitheen, Chelonian, Nestene, Drahvin. Sycorax, Haemogoth, Zygon, Atraxi, Draconian. They're all here for the Pandorica.”

The Doctor spins in midair, in frustration or confusion or fear, one of those. “Why, though? Why are they here? What do they want with the Crocodile?”

“Out,” says the Lily. “Out, now, maybe if we’re quick enough - “ and then she’s pulling em up the corridor, Amelia trailing behind them -

(They aren’t quick enough.)

The sky is full of light.

The Doctor stares up at it with something like wonder, like ey doesn’t realize that all of them are out to kill em. “Everybody who ever hated me,” ey muses. “Why are they here? What do they want?”

“You need to run,” Tiger Lily says, and she’s almost pleading now. “For once in your life, Doctor, run for it. Leave this box the hell alone, let the Crocodile trap itself, I don’t care. Tell me you’ll run.”

“Run where?”

“Well, what are you going to do here? Leave me behind if you have to, take my key and burn it for extra fuel! Just go, Doctor! “

“You know I can’t.” Ey's painfully calm. “There are too many ships up there, and some of them are advanced enough to run vortex block-transfers. I won’t get anywhere.”

“Then what will you do, Doctor?”

“You, though ... You could go. You’ve got your manipulator, you could get past them, make it to Alpha Centauri or so. They won’t be calibrated for manipulators, they don’t care about humans messing with the timelines. Just me.”

“How do you know?”

The Doctor smiles at her. It’s not the silly smile, not the scary one. It’s the one that’s too old for eir face. (Sometimes Amelia wonders how much of a child ey really is.) “Because it’s me they’re after.”

“Doctor?” asks Amelia, reaching for eir hand. She’s starting to get scared. Ey's acting like ey can’t win this, and that has never happened before.

Ey turns the smile on her. “Everything’s going to be alright.”

[=\\\=]

rule one

_they always say that._

[=\\\=]

“So what does any of this have to do with the tardis exploding?”

They’re sitting below, waiting for Tiger Lily to come back from her mission to find something to help them - and the Doctor is shivering, almost violently, eir hand shaking hers. She’s trying to distract him, but whatever’s happening it’s hurting em hard.

“Nothing. Not yet. I don’t know. I expect I’ll find out soon. _Amelia.”_

“...What?”

“Amelia, you promised you’d never leave me. You said you’d never grow up.”

“I did,” she says, “I do, I promise, I won’t ever. Not ever.”

“Amelia, stay with me. Not - just for a little more. Before Lily comes back.”

“Okay.”

“Amelia.” Eir voice is tiny in the dark, lit only by the clock faces of the Pandorica, glowing green against the black. The tardis is away with Tiger Lily, her light gone from the room. “Tell me a story.”

She clears her throat. “Once upon. Once upon a Time…”

[=\\\=]

things are coming to a head. time is running out.

the clock in the belly of the crocodile is ticking

nobody can run forever, doctor.

not even you.

[=|=]

Amelia is uptop now, on Stonehenge, with the Romans. (The Doctor keeps calling them the Lost Boys in eir head, even though it’s nowhere close to true, even though they bear absolutely no resemblance to the children’s army ey led on Neverland. Ey doesn’t understand why.) Ey sent her up to watch the ships above, told her to warn em if anything changes, but that was another lie. (Ey lies so much, now.) Ey sent her up so she wouldn’t have to watch em die.

Ey's below, sitting by the Pandorica, waiting. (Ey's alone. The tardis is with River, and ey's alone.) Ey knows what’s coming.

The tardis buzzes in eir head, telling em _tiger lily tiger lily,_ and ey opens up, waiting teeth-clenched razor-edged for the words.

 _Doctor,_ her voice chimes, in Gallifreyan. Ey hadn’t spoken to anybody in Gallifreyan for so long, before ey met her, and it still hurts, hearing it again. Well, ey talked to the tardis, but the tardis doesn’t really count, since ey's still fundamentally talking to emself.

(Ey remembers knives, and being woven together like fabric, and they tore em _apart_ , they tied eir soul into a ribbon of blue so it would never change, so ey would always be young and eternal and so ey would always forget)

“Where are you? When are you? Hurry up.” Ey needs the tardis back - ey's holding the signal up on eir end, but ey can’t do it properly on eir own.

_Shut up, don’t ask, don’t raise your voice, just listen. The Romans. They’re not real._

“Yes.”

_It’s here, they’re all here. In a book, in Amelia’s house. And the Pandorica -_

‘Why are you even at Amelia’s house? How do you know where it - wait, spoilers.”

_The tardis took a wrong turn, it doesn’t matter. The Pandorica, it’s here too. It’s a story._

“I know.”

_None of it is real, it’s - what did you say?_

“I said I know.”

_Doctor?_

“You said that. Last time we met. Next time for you. You said, you’ll meet me when the Pandorica runs down, and I said, that’s a fairy tale, and you said, aren’t we all? Of course it’s a story. So’s the Time-Eater. The Crocodile. The monster. We knew that.”

 _Doctor! Oh -_  and then a wave of distortion ripples through the message, cutting deeper, a roar like the Cloister Bells.

“What’s that?”

_I don’t know. Something’s happening to the tardis. This isn’t good._

Alarm. “No, that can’t happen. She needs to get back here! She needs to get back here now! You’re flying wrong.”

_Doctor, I fly better than you and you know it._

Ey jumps up, starts pacing, wishing ey'd gone with her - but ey couldn’t, the vortex shields are calibrated for em and besides ey needs to stay here. “Where are you? What timezone?”

_Amelia’s time._

“No, you need to get back in this timezone. Just the vicinity is good enough, my signal will suck it in if you’re close enough, and hurry..”

 _I can’t I -_ ksssch - _she won’t talk to me, she won’t respond, I can barely hear you, there’s something else._

“Just keep moving, I should never have let you take her out in the first place, I don’t care if the vortex manipulator is slow, I shouldn’t - you _need_ to come back,”

_Don’t - kssch - Doctor I’m trying, but I can only pull her so far, what’s happening? Why do you need her?_

“Tiger Lily -”

_I may well die here and there’s ticking everywhere, you could at least have to grace to explain what the hell is going on, you ass._

Ey opens eir mouth. Closes it. “Something’s been chasing me.”

_Keep talking, give me something to home in on, it’s hard to navigate._

Ey talks fast. “Something’s been chasing me since the Game ended and it was my fault. Something got a taste of Neverland and has been chasing the rest of it ever since. I think it knows that there’s only one piece of Neverland left in this universe - whatever you are, Lily, I don’t think you count - and it’s been chewing through the universe on its way to get it. The cracks - you must have seen them, even if you haven’t been to the Byzantium yet - they ate the Daleks at the Crucible, they ate Amelia’s parents, they must have eaten other people but I can’t remember, it’s always the people I forget. The cracks are the Crocodile’s footprints, the patterns left in the sands of time, always homing in on one thing. Neverland.”

_...Oh._

“That is. Me. Except not this me, not really.”

_It’s after the tardis._

“And if it ever gets her, it’ll have the entirety of Neverland inside it, and that’ll give it enough sheer power to eat the universe. Nothing will ever have existed, do you understand? We can’t let that happen. It’s homing in on the tardis, and once she’s gone I won’t be enough to pull it in before the universe is gone.”

_I don’t understand. The Pandorica’s calling it, it’ll only get there faster, that won’t keep it from getting the tardis._

“No it isn’t. It never was. The Pandorica is just - an amplifier. It was always me. It was always my trail it was following.”

_…Whoever’s out there wants you to stay there, okay, but what about you? Why are you going along with their plan?_

“That’s not important, where are you? What timezone?”

_Doctor, stop trying to keep things from me. Why does everyone want to keep you at the Pandorica? How will it change anything if it eats the tardis there?'_

“It can only destroy the universe if it’s in the universe.”

_...No. No, you wouldn’t, not even you._

“What else, Lily?”

_You can’t throw yourself in a spaceloop box with the goddamn Crocodile._

“I was never going to be the jailer,” ey whispers. “I certainly wasn’t going to be the prisoner. The box is and always was intended for the Crocodile. But there’s no power left anywhere strong enough to push it in."

Ey grins what Amelia calls _the scary smile._ “I’m the bait.”

_Someone orchestrated all of this, ripped the box out of Amelia’s memory, got Vincent to paint the Pandorica Runs Down, just to lure you here. And once you’re here - they throw you in, wait for the Croc to go after you, and lock the doors. That’s -_

“Smart. It’s the only way left. Even I can’t run forever, Lily, and it’ll tear the world apart if it stays here. Now where are you?”

Her voice cracks, ever so slightly, and that’s when ey knows it’s gone wrong. _...I’m sorry._

“What? What’s happening?”

_The pull’s too strong. I’ve barely been able to keep us steady, and whatever it’s doing is hurting the tardis too much for her to help._

“You said you were homing in on me!”

_I can lie too, sweetie. The ticking’s very loud now. I think the tardis has been using the last of herself to let us say goodbye, but that’s going to end soon._

“No! River, no!”

_I’m - sorry - my -_

Silence.

“No,” ey whispers. Disbelieving. “ _No.”_ Ey feels like screaming, like pounding the floor, because _it’s not fair._ “No, no no no!” Ey vaguely registers that the Pandorica is completely open now, glaring white light into the room. “No!”

Ey howls eir soulname into the empty air, but she does not, will not, cannot ever answer. Never again. Ey can feel her quiet on the edge of eir mind but any moment now she’ll be gone and then-

The empty air, quite suddenly, stops being empty.

They all transmat in at once - Dalek, Nestene, Cybermen, Sycorax, Sontaran, everyone ey's ever fought and a few ey's saved. They’re trying to save the world, after all. Fair enough, ey can understand the sentiment.

 _THE PANDORICA IS REEEEADY,_ screeches the Dalek Captain, the Supreme something-or-other.

“ _You,”_ snarls the Doctor.

It’s almost imperceptible, but it’s there - the Dalek backs up ever so slightly, shrinking back from those furious golden eyes.

Ey spins into the air. “You! You have timeships, you played the Game, and if there’s ten thousand of you here you’ll have brought at least one. You may hate me, but you know I’m the only one who can save us now.”

 **what. is. this?** the Cyberman buzzes accusingly.

“I am _trying_ to save the world. For about the billionth time too. Come on.”

“You will help us!” shouts a Sontaran commander.

“Yes, I know, but I need a timeship. My tardis is out there.”

_GET IN._

The Doctor stares. “What?”

Then there’s a snap-crack and there’s a whip curled around eir arm, sparking red energy that burns against eir skin. Ey yelps, tries to pull it off, but then there’s more, wrapping around eir limbs, the plastic Romans pulling em down, like a butterfly in a spider’s web. “No, you don’t understand! The tardis isn’t here, it’s after the tardis, locking me in will do nothing!”

 _“The tardis is well-hidden,”_ whispers a cloudlike thing ey's forgotten the name of.

**The Doct-tor. attempts. to Trick us.**

_WE ARE NOT FOOLED. THE TARDIS ONLY FLIES WITH THE DOCTOR._

**“A sCENARIO wAS dEVISED fROM tHE mEMORY oF yOUR cOMPANION,”** rasps what looks like a Sycorax in business casual. **“a tRAP tHE dOCTOR cOULD nOT rESIST.”**

“No, it’s not the perception filter, she’s _actually_ not here, please believe me!” ey gasps, trying to wriggle out of the whips and failing. Without the tardis at eir side ey's no stronger than ey should be for eir size, and the Romans are holding tight. They’re marching forward, and ey doesn’t look behind em but ey knows they’re pulling him, dragging -

 _THROW HIM INN,_ says the white-plated Dalek.

“Listen to me! Total event collapse - every sun will supernova at every moment in _history_ ,” ey pleads, helpless, desperate. “The whole universe will never have _existed_.”

The white light gets brighter, and somewhere at the edge of eir mind ey's aware that the Romans are dissolving under it, the whips disintegrating, but not fast enough and the Cyberleader says something else but the sound can’t, won’t reach em, they all think the Crocodile has already followed em in but there is no ticking, and the doors are closing -

“LISTEN  -  TO  -  ME!”

click.

[=\\\=] 

it’s not dark. it’s white.

endless endless white, like a blank page, like a song unfinished

somehow it’s worse.

[=\\\=]

Amelia never knew. Amelia watches the Romans go downstairs but the Doctor told her to stay up so she stays. Then there is a spark, and then there is nothing.

In planes of reality where ey is capable of thought, the Doctor is glad.

[=\\\=]

ticktock-ticktock

It swallows the universe whole.

It’s difficult to say if the gathered armies ever realize their mistake. They all die, it’s true, Daleks and Cyberman fading into neverwas with the rest of the universe, but the Crocodile eats all of reality at once. Every time, every place, and it’s always hard to say where and when _every time_ intersects with the Daleks’ personal timelines; when it happens for their perspectives. Maybe they even live out their lives in full. It’s not like it matters.

[=\\\=]

The Pandorica floats in an empty universe. A box built to hold death now holds the last stand of life; a box built to contain all the bad lucks and demons has let go of them.

Hell is empty, and all the demons are here; Pandora’s box has been opened.

_But hope is still in the box._

Πάν.

[=\\\=]

In the Crocodile’s mouth, the tardis stops.

She is the soul of Neverland, the last of the Island, and there are certain abilities that come with it. She looks small, but - like most things - she’s different on the inside.

The tardis _stretches._

She ties Tiger Lily up in a loop to keep her safe - and if the loop is her constantly saying goodbye to the Doctor, there’s nothing the tardis can do, not now. That’s relatively easy. The Crocodile doesn’t care about the Lily. The Earth will be harder.

She wraps a time-lock wave around the earth, twists the Dalek’s vortex-blockers into something more, shields the planet in blue light and keeps her own stop going, the Crocodile’s teeth frozen in the middle of swallowing the universe. The tardis is too far gone to be saveable, the universe is gone with her, but if she pushes hard enough she can get that one single planet out into the emptiness and keep it alive - its timeline attempts to collapse under the weight of the contradictions involved but she smashes it back together as hard as she possibly can. Spin it out, and _fly,_ and strike.

There. Planet Earth is safe, for now, but she can’t keep the universe-stop going, and there’s nothing she can do to the probabilities that will keep the Crocodile from eating it as soon as she lets go. She doesn’t have enough left to hide the Earth, too - but she can distract the monster.

The tardis takes a deep breath of vortex fire, and carefully, deliberately, overloads her black-hole heart.

It takes barely seconds of relative time for it to break down, and in the last thing she does before the fire catches is pin it down, twine it into her bones, make it unerasable and unreachable, even for her. If the Crocodile wants her -

\- well, she’s not going to be an easy meal. And while it tries to put out the fire, to get a handle on her, the Earth and her Doctor will be safe - just a little longer.

Then the fire hits, and she stops doing anything other than screaming.

(The Crocodile snarls and backs off a little bit, tongue burned - but the fire can’t keep going forever - )

[=\\\=]

_Rewind._

The Daleks do not die, they do not live, they fossilize, remnants of a dead worldline. Amelia doesn’t disappear, she watches the stars go out and starts to cry - in fear and grief and pain, even though she doesn’t know why. There never were any stars. Amelia was never born.

But she’s still there - she holds on, with a time-traveler’s furious grip on existence, and tries to figure out why the key around her neck is dissolving into fine gold dust, tries to ignore the conflicting raging memories in her head.

[=\\\=] 

And. Then. 

[=\\\=]

tick tock

[=\\\=]

 _“Amelia!_ It’s okay, the key isn’t really gone. Well, it is, but it’s not the end of the world. Well, end of the universe actually. Oh no, hang on. _Kkzzt.”_

“...Doctor?”

[=\\\=]

Amelia lands with a quiet _oof_ and a thump. Jumping down dark holes is scarier when you know you can’t fly. But the Doctor needs her, so down she goes.

Well, both Doctors - the one in the Pandorica and the one with the fez, the one from the future. (A fez. And, for a little while, a broom. Amelia doesn’t think she’ll ever understand em.) She replays eir voice in her head -

 _Part one. Get the vortex manipulator._ She makes her way down the corridor, which seems longer with only one torch, and more than a bit terrifying. _The Daleks and Cybermen and all that lot might be down there, but if they are they’ll just be temporal echoes, they can’t hurt you._ They are, however, she thinks, exceedingly creepy - could have mentioned that, Doctor, thanks.

And then there it is. The Pandorica. It looks exactly like it did when she first saw it - it’s not even glowing green anymore. There’s no sign it was ever opened. But the Doctor is inside it - is inside it now. And the other one, the future Doctor, the fez-Doctor - there was something off about em. Something about eir eyes. Ey never quite looked at her.  

_Part two. Do not let me out._

“Why not?” she’d asked, and ey'd waved her silent with a hand. _Because you_ didn’t _let me out. I’ve done this before, remember? We don’t want to break time even further, us talking is already straining the lock the tardis put on Earth enough. You need to get to 1996. Your time. The manipulator should already be coded for that timezone, just press the red button twice to get to that setting._

She inches forwards, through the open door, trying not to think about what it’s like inside the box, and the fact that she’ll be leaving em in there for two thousand years. She understands the reasoning, mostly, she understands that the vortex manipulator can’t take two when time is this broken, she understands that the Doctor shouldn’t feel it in the pocket-universe made of white and light and emptiness -

\- but she can’t help feeling that she’s abandoning em.

She swallows, picks up the manipulator from the dusty floor next to the great clock face. Straps it around her wrist mechanically, presses the red button twice - then there’s a snap-crackle and a strange, disjointed moment of falling through a red-stained vortex - and there she is.

  1. Her house. The front hall.



She stands there for a moment, frozen by the conflicting memories in her head (she hasn’t been here for so long/she never left/she never was/there are voices upstairs those are her parents/that’s aunt sharon/there are no voices)

A leaflet slides through the mailslot.

She runs to grab it - a flyer for the National Museum. Special exhibit the Pandorica. Then there’s that familiar snap-crackle, and something disappears behind the door.

Okay. She can do this.

[=\\\=]

The National Museum closes slowly, and because she came alone there’s no Aunt Sharon to track her down. She hides behind the penguins until the lights go off and hopes.

She walks to the Pandorica slowly, eyes wide, feeling awfully small again. Prisons are easy to open from the outside, she tells herself; it should recognize that she’s a time-traveler, that she used to have a tardis key, that she has the Doctor’s gold around her. It has to.

She closes her eyes and reaches for the clock face, not daring to hope.

It moves.

She steps back as it slides open, the dials on the sides glowing green, spilling out blinding white light and a hum like forever, eyes wide, trying to see through the glare (it’s not even white, it’s brighter than that, it’s emptiness that shouldn’t exist, that shouldn’t ever exist.) Is that a speck of dark, there, coming closer? She squints harder -

\- and then the Doctor crashes into her, like a bullet from a gun.

There’s a moment, there, between when she focuses on em and when ey opens eir eyes, that she thinks that ey's going to be alright, that she won’t have to use the words. Ey staggers halfway-upright, struggling blindly, fighting eir way into reality - trying to remember how to properly exist after two thousand years of nothing - and ey seems like ey's almost there.

Then eir eyes open. And whatever it is _hits_ em, the full realization, and there is no more spark of gold in them. They are only green, behind the green-blue-gray just endless emptiness - awful soulless dark. And it’s then that she realizes what the future Doctor wouldn’t tell her - that ey's lost the tardis, more than ey lost her when the red sprite-thing kept them locked in separate planes of reality, more than ever before. The tardis is gone, but the Doctor couldn’t go with her, locked into a prison you can’t even escape by dying. The Doctor has survived when nothing should still be alive, quite literally half of emself.

She’s seen em cry - ey has as many ways to cry as to smile. She’s seen melodramatic blubbering and joyful tears and i-don’t-want-to-tantrums and once or twice she’s even seen em cry out of true fear. She’s heard em scream, in rage, in pain, when the Silurians were scanning him, when the shockwave hit, when some blue-skinned aliens tried to ‘fix’ eir pulse. The noise ey's making now is worse.

She can’t take it, she can’t listen, she can’t watch em drag red lines down eir skin with eir fingers, she is Amelia Pond but she is still only seven and she can’t keep being brave.

She screams, slaps him, but ey doesn’t stop, doesn’t seem to be breathing at all. What was the words - the other Doctor taught her, put them in her head so she wouldn’t forget, she can’t forget -

Then they spill out of her mouth, bell-like chimes she shouldn’t be able to pronounce, incomprehensible sibilant sounds and -

“ _Av koschei reyel pigyarisi tardis schylar nix al!”_

And. The noise stops.

She does not move, watches the Doctor take great ragged breaths, still curled up on the floor. With eir eyes closed, ey looks almost human, almost normal. Waits as her own lungs hitch back into their normal rhythm.

“What does it mean?” she asks eventually, leaning back against the wall.

“...Basically, _Koschei survived without eir tardis for nearly an hour once, you can beat him,” ey_ says, in a tiny voice, and she nearly starts crying again from relief.

[=\\\=]

After that things happen fast.

The light from the Pandorica somehow revives a fossilized Dalek, which chases after them shooting wildly until the Doctor tricks it into rolling away from the light, at which point it promptly dies - not permanently, ey explains, but for a while. Somewhere in the confusion, the Doctor gets a hold of a fez - _the_ fez - off a dummy. It’s slightly too big for him, and ey looks absolutely ridiculous but doesn’t seem to care.

Then ey grabs a mop and goes back to tell Amelia how to get here, which involves a lot of zapping around with the manipulator while Amelia feels slightly left out. Also rather confused.

“Are you done?”

“Think so. Alright.” Ey bounds up the stairs almost happily - but, she notices, ey doesn’t fly. She suspects ey can’t, anymore than she can without her key. “Oh, vortex manipulators. Cheap and nasty time travel. Very bad for you,” ey adds, with an air of fatherly concern. “Course they come in awfully useful from time to time. Come along, Pond."

“Where we going?” she asks, hurrying after em.

“The roof,” says the Doctor, and then stops.

Amelia follows eir gaze to an empty spot at the top of the stairs, and then there’s a snap-crackle and the Doctor - a fezless Doctor - falls out of the air, smoking slightly, clothes scorched. And collapses.

Oh no, Amelia thinks, another one. Then she realizes that the fezless one isn’t getting up. The Doctor-with-the-fez rushes up to the other one, but she doesn’t quite dare. “Doctor, is that you?”

“Me from the future,” says her Doctor, and then the other one sits bolt upright, eyes wide and terrified - ey is bleeding, Amelia realizes - and shouts something in the silver language - and then falls down again, boneless, dark eyes blank.

“What was that, what did ey say?” she asks, half-frantic. “What’s wrong with him?”

Her Doctor stands up, utterly calm. She tries not to look at em too hard. The Doctor is so very good at lying, so very good at pretending ey's fine, but even ey can’t hide eir eyes, and they are the eyes of a being torn apart.

“Are you - I mean, is ey - ?”

“Dead? Of course ey's dead. I have twelve minutes though, that’s good.” Ey spins on the spot, keeps heading up the next flight of stairs.

“But I - “ She glances back at the dead Doctor, hesitates, moves on. “How is that good? And I thought you don’t die?”

“I said not usually.”

“How are you so - why don’t you care?”

“I think I may or may not have lost that ability with the tardis.” Ey smiles. “Besides, the universe is collapsing. We’re all living on borrowed time anyway. I just know how long I have. Up this ladder.”

She follows em up onto the roof, where the sun is bright and glaring - too bright, and the sky is -

The sky isn’t even blue anymore. It’s white. An empty universe.

“What.”

“The universe,” the Doctor declares, “doesn’t exist anymore. Earth has no atmosphere and no solar system. There are no stars left in the sky. We don’t have much time left.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for Tiger Lily.”

“But she was gone. She went away with the tardis, and then the Crocodile - how do I know that?”

“Feedback, we were using the tardis to communicate, it filtered through your key on the way. Point is, I’m looking for the tardis, and she’s gone. Except,” ey says, and points at the ground. “We’re still here.”

“And that means?”

“It means that the tardis is fighting it. It means she’s keeping us safe, keeping us warm. It means she’s keeping the Croc busy while we try to save the world. But I know she’s gone. If any piece of her were still in existence, she’d still be in my head. And _that_ means she’s distracting the Croc in the only way she still can - “

Ey raises the vortex manipulator to the sun. “She is burning. And, at least in this plane of existence, she won’t ever _stop_ burning.”

“Are you saying - the sun -”

“It’s not a sun. It’s my tardis.”

Amelia takes a moment to digest this. “And Tiger Lily?”

“Emergency protocols dictate that the tardis tie her into a secluded corner of the vortex and time-loop her. Not that there’s much of the vortex left - but we’re in the right timezone, I should be able to just pop in and get her.” Ey finishes pressing various buttons, checks that the strap is tight.

“Now?”

“Hello, sweetie,” ey breathes, and then ey's gone.

[=\\\=]

“Alright,” says the Lily, bent over, breathing hard. Amelia is guessing the time-loop wasn’t a nice place to be either. She stands up, mostly, takes another breath. “I have questions, but number one on the list is this: What in the name of sanity - “

Turn. Raise eyebrow.

“ - have you got on your _head_?”

“It’s a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool.” Ey straightens it on eir head, flashes Tiger Lily a grin. “It’s like a giant kiss.”

“...What?”

Amelia makes frantic _stop it_ motions behind eir back. Tiger Lily takes this as her cue to throw the fez over the side of the building and blow it up.

“...Aww.”

Tiger Lily grins back at em smugly. Amelia wonders if she’s noticed eir eyes.

That’s about when the Dalek appears over the side of the building.

[=\\\=]

“When the Crocodile ate the universe,” ey reels off, thinking out loud again, stumbling down the stairs. “Total event collapse. It got every atom of the universe. It got Earth too, before the tardis saved it. You aren’t technically the original Amelia anymore. Even the vortex - you too, Tiger Lily. There’s only one barrier it can’t pass, one nut it can’t crack.”

“The Pandorica,” Tiger Lily finishes, scanning the room with her blaster.

“The perfect prison. And inside it, perfectly preserved, a few billion atoms of the universe as it was, i. e, me. In theory, you could extrapolate the whole universe from a single one of them, like, like cloning a body from a single cell. And we’ve got the bumper family pack.”

“I don’t get it.” Amelia sighs.

“We can reset the universe to what it was before, using what was left of it. All we need to do is reset it with no Crocodile, and no. No…”

“No _what,”_ says the Lily. Amelia suspects she’s a bit cross with em.

“Well, no me.”

“No!” Amelia burst, surprising herself. She stops in the middle of the Eastern exhibit. “No, you can’t!”

“No, we need, we need to burn Neverland. No Neverland, no Crocodile. No me. We need to get the time-fire that killed the tardis to spread onto the Crocodile. It has the tardis’s power, but it can’t eat Earth yet, not without burning up itself. Right now it’s circling, it isn’t attacking, it’s waiting for the fire to burn down, for the lock to break. We have almost no time left.”

“How would you even do that? It’s impossible!” Tiger Lily protests.

“Almost. Almost impossible. But we have an amplifier. Right here.”

“The Pandorica?’ Amelia tries.

Ey turns on her. “Yes. Exactly. Big Bang Two. We fly it at the fire with its bit of the universe inside. The amplifier takes my signal, what’s left of the tardis’s, throws it straight at the Croc. It can’t resist, it bites down - and then Earth is gone and so is the tardis, but the time-fire will catch, and the Croc can’t ever eat the Pandorica with its piece of the universe, so the light can restore -”

Ey runs out into the great hall, straight into the path of the Dalek laser.

(Ey doesn’t make a sound. Just gasps, and then there’s the familiar snap-crackle, and nothing.)

“Doctor!” screams the Lily, throwing a blaster bolt at the Dalek at the other end of the hallway without even looking. It screeches and goes dead. “Damn it, ey could be anywhere - “

“The stairs. Twelve minutes ago.” Amelia hears herself say.

“Show me!”

“Lily, ey's dead. I saw it.”

“How did - did ey tell you that?”

“Yes…?”

The Lily closes her eyes, breath hissing between her teeth. “Rule one. The Doctor lies.”

 _SYSTEMS RESTOOOOOORING!,_ the Dalek roars in the background.

“It’s coming back to life!”

“You go,” says the Lily, almost as calm as the empty-eyed Doctor. “I’ll come after you.”

[=\\\=]

it’s getting dark

we say goodbye

the sun has gone to

bed, & so must I

and in the white

all bright as black

the Croc

is coming

back

[=\\\=]

Ey's slumped against the Pandorica, eyes shut, barely breathing.

“Doctor,” Amelia sobs, “Doctor, why would you do that?”

But no, ey's moving, waking up. Tiger Lily’s voice is clear behind her.

“We were a diversion. As long as the Dalek was chasing us, ey could work down here.” Her voice is cold with fury. “Ey used emself as a pawn. That’s cold. Even for him, that’s cold.”

Amelia glances up at her. “What happened to the Dalek?”

“It died. Doctor, can you hear me?”

“River,” ey breathes, eyes still shut. “Big Bang Two.”

“What does ey mean?” Amy asks the Lily, trying to hold herself together. “Big Bang Two, ey wants to reboot the universe?”

“Ey's betting on the fact that the Time-Eater, like real crocodiles, is just a bit thick, and might just bite off more than it can chew. Ey's going to put emself in the explosion. Burn the Crocodile, emself with it, and let the Pandorica use eir corpse to rebuild the universe,” Tiger Lily snarls.

“That would work? That would bring everything back?”

“Except em. And the Croc. Oh, that’s clever, ey's tied the vortex manipulator to the pocket universe inside the Pandorica. It might even work.”

“Ey'll be gone.”

Tiger Lily turns back to Amelia, takes a shaky breath. “Ey'll never have existed.”

The Doctor whispers something in eir language that ends with a spark-soft ‘Amelia.’

“Ey wants to talk to you,” the Lily tells her, and seems to straighten. “We won’t see each other again. Not in this reality.”

She walks out with her head held high.

“Amelia.”

“Shh. Shh, I’m here.

“Remember… you promised me.” Eir eyes blink open, and the sheer agony behind them knocks the breath out of her again. “No, Amelia, it’s okay. It’ll be over soon.”

“Is that what this is about? Your death wish?” Amelia says. The words feel cruel and foreign on her tongue.

“It’s about … you. Do you remember your house, Amelia? Have you forgotten that? I never forget the things. Just the people.”

“No, I, I remember.”

“It had too many rooms… Didn’t it ever bother you, that your life didn’t make any sense? That great old house, just for you and your aunt? You said there was a crack .. in your wall.”

“I,” Amelia starts. “I forgot that. How did I forget that? There was something else.”

“Two points of space and time that shouldn’t ever touch, together in your bedroom. I ran away with you because I knew what it was, and I knew it was coming for me. I ran away because it ate your parents and it was going to eat you too, and you helped me, and I couldn’t let that happen…”

“I don’t. I don’t have parents.” Amelia repeats it. “I never did. I don’t need a mother. I was like you, we could fly together.”

“Oh… Amelia, I’ve been so selfish. I took you for myself. Amelia, when the universe comes back, if you remember them, they’ll be there.”

“I don’t. How can I remember them if they never happened?”

“Time.. heals itself. And you were always special, Amelia Pond, you will, whether you like it or not. Amelia.” Ey staggers upright. “I can get into the Pandorica. I can’t lock myself in. You have to.”

“No,” She won’t let go of eir hand. “I can’t, I need you.”

“No, you don’t. You’ll have your family back, you won’t need me anymore. You’ll forget me, like you forgot them.” Eir eyes are pits, deep and dust-dark and desolate. “Everyone forgets.”

“I _won’t.”_ She takes a breath. “I promise I’ll wait for you. I’ll never grow up. And you have to promise to come back. I will never forget you.”

“You won’t be able to help it.”

“I _will not._ If I can remember my parents, I can remember you.”

Ey looks at her, admiration brimming in eir eyes, and smiles - a new smile, not a scary one or a happy one or a lying one. “Maybe you will, at that.”

“It’s not goodbye,” she tells him, even as she lets go of eir hand. “It’s not.”

“Okay,” ey says, and steps into the light. ”I believe you.”

Then ey turns around, four steps into the Pandorica, standing on nothing but white, eyes a little less dark. “Just touch it again. It’ll recognize what you want.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and Amelia?”

“Yes?”

“I promise I’ll find you. On the other side. You remember me, and I’ll find you. Guess what?”

“What?” she says, as door begins to slide shut.

“Gotcha.”

The lock clicks shut.

She steps back, unsure, eyes wide and waiting. In the end, it’s rather underwhelming; the box snaps out of existence with the same boring snap-crackle.

Amelia Jessica Pond, seven years and forever old, stands in the empty room. Looks up. Sees the sun through the glass ceiling. Gasps.

And unravels, quietly, cleanly.

[=\\\=]

silence, where silence is the thick yellow air before the oncoming storm -

(silence will fall - )

[=\\\=]

 _boom_.

[=\\\=]

Rewind -

[=\\\=]

“Dear Santa.”

“Thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you, but honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know it's not, because at night there's voices, so please, please, could you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman. Or a -“

Something whooshes. She goes to the window, frowning.

There’s nothing there.

[=\\\=]

She remembers em.

She keeps her promise. She draws em and she reconstructs em out of cardboard and papier-mâche, and she waits for em. Mum calls em her imaginary friend, her Doctor, but Amelia knows ey is real, refuses to believe that ey's in any way not real. (Although ey was always imaginary. That was the point of em. Ey was a story made flesh.)

Ey doesn’t come back.

Mum and Da stop laughing when she sets a place for the Doctor at the table, start frowning, sharing concerned looks. The first psychiatrist happens two months after she wakes up and ey isn’t there; he's an ass and she bites him when he tries to straighten her hair.

That doesn’t help with the concerned looks. Amelia forces her feet into her old shoes and believes as hard as she can. Ey was made out of belief, in the dawn days; belief might just bring em back.

She makes friends with the boy who lives three houses away. His name is Rory. They play together, and she tells him the entire convoluted story, about the tardis and the crack in her wall and the vortex and Tiger Lily.

Rory nods. She tries not to think about the fact that there is no crack in her wall, that there never was one. That’s just because the Crocodile never existed to put it there. That’s all. That really is all.

Six months later, she finally gets new shoes, admits to herself that she’s growing no matter what she does to stop it. A year later, she bites the last psychiatrist, the fifth one. Two years later, she’s started to believe what the psychiatrist says, because the awful thing is that the older she gets the less the Doctor makes sense, the more ey seems like a dream, a hallucination she thought up, a perfect magical thing to take her away from Leadworth and England and show her the universe.

Three years later, Rory admits that he never believed her story, and she isn’t mad at him.

When she is ten, Doctor Madison - the psychiatrist - tells her that she needs to let go. That it never happened. That Amelia is reaching an age where holding on to fantasies stops being strange and innocent, and starts being harmful. That this is her last chance to be normal. She doesn’t say it, but Amelia hears it anyway: ey _isn’t coming back._

The day after that, she burns the cardboard figurines and tells Rory to call her Amy.

When she is nineteen, something happens.

There’s a noise in the front garden - a noise she knows, a noise like nothing except the laws of physics being elbowed aside by a certain blue light. She runs out, heart in her mouth, and there’s nothing there.

That’s the day when she finally, finally accepts that it was all a dream.

Amy Pond moves on. Rory proposes to her, blushing furiously, on her twentieth birthday at the seaside, and she accepts, and when ey kisses her she does not think of thimbles for the first time. On the 26th of April, they are married, and she is happy, and when her mother teases her with stories about believing in her imaginary friend too hard she laughs with everyone else.

A figure with curly golden hair does leave a blue notebook on the table, but she never even glances at it.

Years pass. She has a daughter.

They name her Melody, and she has never been so happy, will never be as happy as when she’s holding her baby Mels and kissing Rory, still in the hospital gown.

Melody was an odd child, but not as odd as Amy was, and besides, Amy loves her all the more for it. She always had an strange, inquiring look around her, and as soon she was old enough she was asking questions about everyone and everything, and especially the Doctor. Amy answered them with smiles, and told her fantasies as bedtime stories. When Melody asked where they came from, she just said she’d made them up, which was perfectly true. They’d sit in Melody’s bedroom - the same bedroom that used to be plastered in pictures of a small golden-eyed figure in a fez, Amelia’s bedroom - and Amy would keep talking until she fell asleep.

And Melody always pulls the sheet over their heads for the first story, making a little tent in the nighttime room.

“What do you see, Mommy?”

“Mostly black,” Amy says, and smiles in the dark.

“No you don’t, you see when you were a little girl.”

“Oh, that was a long time ago, sweetheart. Time flies, doesn’t it?”

This is part of their ritual, cue for Melody to say “Does it fly like you and the Doctor do?”

“Mhm. Well, we were probably even a little faster. But I didn’t really fly, Melody,”

“Shh, that’s not part of the story.”

Amy laughs. “Alright then. I could fly.”

“Why can’t you fly now?”

“Well, you know, grown-ups can’t fly. But you’re just the right size!”

“Why not?”

“Well, you have to be gay and innocent and heartless to fly. Heartless is the important bit. See, the Doctor didn’t have a proper soul; ey'd cut it out so ey could fly better, and that was the tardis. But children don’t have hearts and souls to weigh them down anyway. You grow them when you’re older. In the same way boys stop being disgusting when you’re older. You’ll see.”

“Where was it, mum?”

“Right here. In this room.”

“Ooh.”

And she tells the story of how the Doctor came in, of the scorched circle on the carpet, how she sewed the tardis and eir shadow back on.

“Then I said, well, we have carrots left, and then ey said, no, I need fish fingers. And - “ She waggles her eyebrows. “Custard! ”

Melody Pond (they’d agreed on Pond, it sounded better) laughs out loud, high and bright.

“And then the tardis came back - “

“You forgot the stairs!”

“All right, I walked up the stairs because ey was a silly ass and ey flew up beside me. And I told em ey was flying, and ey said ‘oh. Right.’”

“Yes,” says Melody with great feeling. “That was it.”

“Then ey gave me a key, and flew me off through the vortex, and then we landed on a spaceship that was called Starship UK.”

“What’s the noise it made, Mummy?”

“It was like this,” Amy says, and inhales, wheezing out air in her best impression of that ethereal impossible sound - _vworp. vworp. vworp._

“No, it was like this,” announces Melody, and imitates it much better.

“Oh, that’s perfect, Melody, good job.”

“Ooh! Tell about the Beast Below, Mommy.”

“Not now, we’ll do that tomorrow.”

“Aww.”

“Good night, darling. See you in the morning.”

“Night night.”

Amy smiles as she turns the lights out.

 

[=\\\=]

Amy sneaks back in before going to bed. Opens the door, closes it, without letting light in.

Melody sleeps like an angel, like the song she was named after. Amy smoothes her hair back and sits down beside the bed, looking at the stars.

And she is happy. She _is_ happy, with Rory and Melody and the old house. She’s all grown up, and she honestly doesn’t need the Doctor anymore.

That’s when it happens.

First there’s a noise - a noise that hums through the floor, a noise she can’t quite identify. She frowns, looks up, but there’s nothing. It’s just on the edge of her hearing, a noise like. Like. Like.

(What’s the noise it made, Mommy?)

Oh. No. What?

The sound escalates, heightens, and suddenly there’s a wind in the room, blowing her long ginger hair across her face but she doesn’t care, she is gasping for air, _this is not happening it cannot be happening._ She presses herself against the bed, sliding down the wall squeezing into the corner, face ashen, but she can’t seem to look away, and then the blue glow grows in the room and she is hallucinating she has to be this is not real this is not fair _this cannot be happening._

And then ey jumps out of the air, slipping through the dark between the stars, woven of the same fabric as the sky. Ey's laughing as ey lands, tardis at eir side, light-footed and still just as heartless, for all that ey had two of them -

No, ey isn’t, ey is not here, she’s lost it for the last time and they’ll send her back to the psychiatrists and the pills and the white walls, but oh God ey looks exactly the same, down to eir little white teeth like razors in the light, even that flop of hair, and ey used to be exactly her size but only now does she realize how _small_ that was. Even when she was eighteen, she still imagined em _just her size,_ but ey's not, ey's seven years old, ey's a child and suddenly when she thinks back to the Pandorica she just wants to sweep em up and hug em.

Oh, God.

Ey pads out of the patch of moonlight, to the bed, and ey must not see her curled up in the corner, because ey announces “I’m back!” cheerfully to the sleeping Melody, and even eir voice is the same, eir eyes glowing their joyful impossible gold.

“I made it! I was just a story, but that was always like that. Neverland’s still gone, but there’s no more Croc. No more cracks. I checked. I kept my promise,” ey smiles proudly, and then eir head tilts, puzzled. “Amelia?”

“I’m here,” says Amy in the corner, hair in her face, legs in her nightgown, and how eir face lights up when ey hears her.

Ey spins in the air, tilts eir head at her. “What’re you doing in the corner?”

“...Visiting.”

“I thought this one was you,” ey explains self-importantly, and pokes Melody, who groans and shifts a little. “Did your parents get a new one?”

“Yes.”

“Boy or girl or something else?”

“Girl.”

“What’s her name?”

“...Melody.”

“Melody Pond,” ey declares. “That’s a brilliant name. Like a fairy tale. Like yours. She could come with us, if you like.”

“ _No.”_ She surprises herself with her ferocity, but she cannot, must not let em take Melody.

Ey peers at her curiously. (The tardis, she notes, hangs farther back. She knows.) “Well, all right then. Come along, Pond.”

She curls up further, prays that ey won’t notice how long her limbs are. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t fly anymore,” she explains brokenly.

“Well, you don’t have a key anymore. The tardis can give you a new one.”

“No, I, I.”

“Amelia? What’s wrong?”

“My name is not Amelia,” she snarls dully.

“...It’s not?”

“I’m _Amy._ I’m Amy, and I didn’t need you anymore, you little _bastard!”_

Ey backs up in the air, uncertain. “Amelia? Am I late? How much, was it - Amelia, did I - Six months? I’m sorry, I couldn’t remember you at first, I don’t remember people well, but I found you, look.”

Somehow the fact that ey honestly seems to feel sorry makes it worse. “ _Don’t call me that!”_

“Amel- Amy, Amy, I’m sorry,” ey manages, “You can still come with me.”

Then the sick fury is too much for her and she stands up.

The look of utter, absolute _horror_ on eir face as she unfolds cuts all her old scars open again. She towers over em now, head held high, wiping hair and hot bitter tears out of her face. Ey opens eir mouth, and closes it, and how _confused ey_ is, how awfully innocent, breaks her.

“Doctor, I grew up.” she whispers, miserable. “I grew up forever ago.”

“No you didn’t!”

“I’m married, Doctor.”

“No,” ey wails. “No, no, no!”

“Melody’s not my sister, she’s my daughter. You didn’t come back, Doctor.”

“But you promised!” ey screams, and eir voice is high and thin and horrible. “You promised you’d never grow up! You’d never forget me, if I survived, and I did!”

“I couldn’t help it, it happened, Doctor, you never showed up! Everyone told me you weren’t real! What was I supposed to do?”

Eir little face turns white. “You stopped. You stopped believing in me.”

“Of course I,” she starts, but the sorrow in eir golden eyes is deeper than should be possible. Was ey always like this, always on the edge of madness, always made of broken glass and bad memories? Did she just not see? “I couldn’t help it, Doctor.”

But ey's inching away from her, and eir face has morphed into disgust, and she knows she’s lost em. “Please!”

“ _You’re not Amelia.”_

That strikes her silent.

Ey spirals upward, until they’re eye to eye, and there is so much hatred in eir face she can’t breathe. “You’ve come and replaced her. No, no, you’re trying to steal her away. To convince me I’m alone. _Amelia_ needs me.”

“No, I was Amelia.”

“ _Not anymore.”_ Ey is ice and fire and rage deeper than any sun.

“I was Amelia, I changed, Doctor! Humans change!”

“You _promised,_ ” and that’s when she realizes what’s wrong. Ey's a _child._ Ey is and always will be a child. And children believe in the sanctity of promises, children believe that the world is fair, children don’t realize that things change. And nothing angers them, shocks them, more than a broken promise. Hell hath no desperate pleading fury like a child wailing _it’s not fair._

It’s the first step to growing up, she supposes. And once you grow up, you stop caring, you grow numb to the awfulness of it. But _he_ won’t. Ey can experience the sheer betrayal of a broken promise over and over again.

“You promised,” ey repeats again, and a single golden tear runs down eir cheek.

And then before she can explain, apologize, say _anything, ey's_ spinning away, and she reaches out but she can’t catch em before ey's back among the stars

And the last words she catches off him, through the ripples of the vortex, are _I’ll play with Melody instead._

[=\\\=]

Amy Pond lives in fear.

Rory can tell. He hasn’t asked but she knows ey knows because of the worried looks ey gives her over dinner, in their bed. The look that says _Amy, I love you, you know you can tell me anything. Amy, I love you, I won’t ever leave you. Amy, I love you, I will miss you if you go._

But he thinks it’s just the depression, he thinks she’s been forgetting her pills or not taking them, he thinks it’s like the time she tried to jump off the Leadworth Bridge into the river below when she was thirteen, the time she ended up pushing him in because he pulled her back and then fell in after him and it was just cold and painful and wet and not at all what she wanted.

He doesn’t understand. She thinks maybe Melody does. She stops telling stories about the Doctor, keeps telling Melody (her Mels, her baby) that ey's not a good thing, that she mustn’t go with him, and Melody nods dutifully, says _I know, Mommy._

She sleeps on the floor of Melody’s room. Rory helps her pulls the old pullout sofa over, confused but always supportive, and he seems to think that sleeping there is better than not sleeping at all. God, she doesn’t deserve him. She wakes up every time the wind rustles through the trees.

Still, she knows with awful certainty that when _ey_ comes back, she won’t wake up. Ey'll grab Melody by the hand and grin _come along, Pond_ and then she’ll be gone, and ey'll never bring her back, ey'll let her forget her home and her mother and they’ll live forever together where Amy never could.

_(It’s not fair.)_

[=\\\=]

Four weeks later, when she wakes up, Melody’s bed is empty and long gone cold.

Not even Rory can pull her back from the edge then.  



End file.
